WHAT IF EDMUND HAD JUST SAID NO TO QUEEN JADIS?
by KateGladstone
Summary: Edmund got himself (and others) in to huge trouble for accepting candy and a hot drink from the evil White Witch. What if he had Just Said "No"?


What if Edmund had refused Jadis's hot drink and Turkish Delight?

"Perhaps something hot to drink?" said the Queen. "Should you like that?"

Edmund's teeth were chattering, but he was a very practical boy. (People with small imaginations often are.) Edmund, in fact, had just enough imagination to imagine, pretty easily, what might happen if he accepted anything from a complete stranger — especially a rather odd-looking stranger who definitely looked quite un-English — especially if way the stranger was offering was meant to be drunk or eaten. Who knew, after all, what horrid and dangerous things might be in it?

"N-no ... no, thank you, ma'am," he barely managed to say, meanwhile vigorously shaking his head in case he could not be easily understood because of how he sounded through his chattering teeth and frozen lips.

"Are you sure?" said the Queen. She took from somewhere among her wrappings a very small bottle which looked as if it were made of copper. Then, holding out her arm, she let one drop fall from it on the snow beside the sledge. Edmund saw the drop for a second in mid-air, shining like a diamond. But the moment it touched the snow there was a hissing sound and there stood a jewelled cup full of something that steamed. The dwarf immediately took this and handed it to Edmund with a bow and a smile; not a very nice smile.

The drink, whatever it was, looked and smelled deliciously sweet and foamy and creamy: something like hot chocolate (only much more enticing), and something like toffee apples (if toffee apples were liquid and creamy and frothy instead of being solid and sticky and crunchy).

Edmund could imagine — he could not help imagining — how very much better he would feel, if only he began to sip the hot drink. He just barely prevented himself from reaching out and drinking it straight down, by telling himself that he was far too grown-up and intelligent to be taken in by a complete stranger whom he knew little or nothing about.

"N-n-no, th-th-thanks," he managed to chatter (his lips, and in fact his entire face, were quite blue by this time). Inside his head, though, he was thinking to itself all the while, "She probably thinks I'm a silly baby: a little kid like Lucy, who will trust absolutely anyone. If Lucy were here instead of me, she'd have had that hot drink down her throat immediately, and whatever else was coming next. Two minutes after that, she'd be passed out on that pile of furs, with either the Queen or that dwarf — most likely both of them — getting ready to do something horrid to her before she woke up: if she woke up at all, that is. Not that it wouldn't be precisely what she deserved. Well, almost."

There is no telling how long Edmund might have gone on thinking this — meanwhile, the Queen was looking at him with a very puzzled and angry expression, as if she could not understand why he was letting his drink grow cold — except that, right after the moment he thought the word "almost," Edwin stopped thinking at all. This was, of course, because he had finally frozen right through — even despite being within the softest, warmest fold of the Queen's fur mantle — and was, in fact, what grown-up people call "dead."

The Queen smiled even wider (this time, to her Dwarf), and this time it was an even less nice smile than her smile to Edmund had been. "See, Crupsmickle!" (for that was the Dwarf's name) "What does itmatter that some few Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve refuse our enthralling hospitality? All such inconvenient persons swiftly cease to trouble us!" As she said this, the Dwarf nodded — he had plainly heard this before, more than once — and kicked Edmund's frozen body out of the Queen's sledge for the wolves to eat.

I have mentioned that Edmund was now "dead," as grown-up people call it. One result of this, of course, was that he fortunately did not at all notice the wolves eating his body — or, rather, eating the body that had been his. Another, and less fortunate, result — back in England — was that Professor Kirke, his housekeeper Mrs. Macready, and Peter and Susan and Lucy too, all very soon became suspects in a difficult missing-persons case, which was so nasty and notorious and complicated that it was brought to court almost immediately, but took several years for a verdict to be reached.

The result of it all, in the end, was that Professor Kirke was sent to prison — where he died of grief ten years afterward, because he had not been permitted to take his beloved books with him. (Although the authorities had allowed him to read a very few books of their own choosing while he was in prison, and they had eventually even permitted him to write some books of his own, nobody wanted to buy books written by a man who was believed to have made away with a child. This was partly because some of the books were stories for children, and partly because all of the books — including and especially the ones for children — has a great deal to do with Professor Kirke's explanations of how and why to be a good person while you were alive, so that you could be a happy person after you died. For some reason, people had stopped thinking that Professor Kirke was likely to know a great deal about that subject.)

Mrs. Macready might have been tried and sent to prison, too, but the morning after Edmund's disappearance, she had been found dead in her bed next to six empty bottles of the painkiller she had been taking for her rheumatism.

Peter, Susan, and Lucy were taken into custody by the Authorities. Peter, who had recently had a birthday and was therefore just old enough to be tried as an adult, was told by a man with some political influence (an unpleasant uncle named Scrubb) that it was possible for Peter's case to be quietly dismissed if he joined the Army. Peter did this (although mainly because he had been thinking for quite a while of doing it when he was old enough), and he spent the term of his enlistment peeling potatoes and (after the first few days) giving up on trying to explain over and over to the other soldiers that, no, he had not killed Edmund, and that neither he nor anyone else had any idea at all where Edmund had gone to, let alone how Edmund had managed to do it.

After Peter was discharged, he joined the French Foreign Legion and was never heard from again.

Susan was just a bit too young to be tried like Peter, so instead she was sent to a Home For Troublesome Young Women. (As she later wrote in her diary: "Whoever named that place certainly knew what they were doing. I was not a troublesome young woman when I came here three months ago, but to-day I can honestly state that I have become as troublesome as any other young woman they have ever had brought here." Susan is still there, only partly because her diary was found.)

Lucy was far too young to be allowed in the Home for Troublesome Young Women, and furthermore she was by now considered quite mad (or, as the newspapers were calling it, "mentally unbalanced and maladjusted") because of the very strange stories she had been telling, to everyone who would listen, beginning about the time that Edmund disappeared.

In fact, Lucy had been about to be sent into a mental asylum, until a very famous woman who was the Head of a very famous school called Experiment House wrote to her Member of Parliament, to the Inspector of Schools, and to all the newspapers, as well as to Lucy's parents.

What the Head wanted, she explained in all these letters, was a chance to help Lucy become mentally balanced and adjusted (and therefore no longer mad), and the way that the Head wanted to do this was to accept Lucy into Experiment House as a student, on a full scholarship, "because Lucy is an extremely interesting case. If someone in her dire situation can be helped to adjust to the real world, instead of retreating into archaic fantasies based on outmoded myths and imagery, she may well have the potential for a full and meaningful life. As the paradigmatic example of a psychologically traumatized child, torn between the forward march of modern civilization and the outdated escapist fantasies and authoritarian standards that have traditionally been imposed upon the children who are humankind's only hope for future progress, Lucy represents a potentially ideal demonstration case for the benefits of that modern, progressive, and frankly experimental education which Experiment House takes pride in having pioneered and perfected. It is therefore hoped, by the entire staff of Experiment House, and particularly by myself as its Head, that Mr. and Mrs. Pevensie are forward-looking, forward-thinking individuals who will permit Lucy to avail herself of the opportunity being offered, and that Lucy will join other future citizens of a new and better society by enrolling at Experiment House this coming term."

What the Head of Experiment House meant by all this, if you put it into ordinary English, was: "Poor Lucy Pevensie is quite mad, doubtless because she has a horrid old-fashioned family who taught her to read horrid old-fashioned books and sent her to a horrid old-fashioned school that worried about horrid old-fashioned things such as whether anything is right or wrong: all of which l has definitely got to have something to do with why she so interestingly made away with her brother, in whatever interesting way she managed this. Because the child is mad, and because I spend my life experimenting on children whenever I can get anyone to pay me to experiment on theirs, I would like very much to experiment on Lucy: so much so, that I will even do this if I am not paid to do it. If my experimenting stops her being mad, as I rather assume it will, it will be a marvelous advertisement for the school, which is one reason I am l willing to do it for free, so I do hope that Lucy's parents can be persuaded to go along."

Lucy is still at Experiment House: although possibly not after this term, because the Head has realized that in fact she finds Lucy far less interesting than various students whose parents are paying to have them there. This is partly because Lucy began (rather quickly in her first term) to be tortured and robbed and ridiculed rather often by a number of the Head's other "interesting cases." (At Experiment House, the easiest way to stop being an "interesting case" for the Head is to be harmed or ridiculed by one of the other "interesting cases." The second easiest way is to fight back or otherwise defend oneself, in any manner whatsoever, when harmed or ridiculed by an "interesting case," because the Head believes that this is "descending to violence and revenge.")

So the Head would have really liked very much to send Lucy away from Experiment House: making up, if necessary, some excuse such as that Lucy's marks had gone down. However, the Head knew she could not safely do this, because (thanks to the Head's own efforts) by now everyone in the country, even the Members of Parliament, knew that: /1/ the Head's promise to educate Lucy at no cost had said not one word about making any of this depend on Lucy's marks, and /2/ marks at Experiment House are not considered to matter nearly as much as at other schools.

Meanwhile, we must not forget Edmund. Immediately after his body and brain died of extreme cold, the rest of him — the part that, of course, is the only really real part of anyone — found itself in a warm, sunny meadow, being stared at by an immense Lion.

The Lion said, in a deep, soft voice that was somehow both sad and stern: "Edmund. You have no idea how many, many things have gone wrong — in two worlds — because you decided on what you wanted rather than what I wanted: for you decided to follow your selfish, self-interested prudence, rather than to be like Lucy with her trusting and unconditional acceptance of a gift freely given. In another world, in another time, I might have done something about it — but not here, not now, for the means of the doing cannot here and now be done. You see, you are already what they call 'dead' in the Shadowlands."

Edmund (who did not see at all) asked: "What do you mean ... uh, sir, lion, whoever you are? What is your name, since you obviously know mine?"

"I have many names, in many worlds. In your world — the world where you were born — you had not yet come to know me by the name which is mine in your world. Yet in the world where you died, you had not lived long enough to even hear spoken, very often, the name which is mine in that world. Since one of the reasons you were brought to that world was in order that you might come to know me by the name I bear in your own world, let us not now speak of names and destinies. For I tell no one what might have been, except of course when I know by my wisdom that the one who hears the telling will not hold it against me."

"What's your point?"

"You, Son of Adam, call it a 'point' more rightly than you know, For it is the point with which the Deep Magic was first written, before the first stirrings of time, in letters as deep as a spear is long on the trunk of the World Ash Tree, on the firestones of the Secret Hills, and on certain other things and places which are deep and wide and firm enough to bear that which has been wrought into the very fiber of the universe by the hand of my father" — and here, Edmund always said ever afterwards, the Lion bowed his head and purred, in a purr that was like a whisper with thunderstorms beneath it — "the Emperor-over-Sea."

"Sir, I don't understand."

"You have, by your one small act of prudence in one world, unmade in two worlds things beyond your understanding: things which cannot be remade unless Time Itself should work backwards: and this cannot be done, because it is the Deeper Magic which cannot be made until the Deep Magic itself is fulfilled. And it is only by your one small act of courtesy in that same world — your merely thinking the word 'almost' because you decided, at the last possible moment, that your sister did not, after all, absolutely deserve death — that you are in My Country and in your right mind instead of being as you might have been. Behold."

And at this word, the Lion pointed (with his tail) at a distant glen, whose lowest point Edmund could suddenly somehow see as clearly as if he had been standing at its very centre. Within the glen were standing, or seated, or crouching, or perched (according to their various anatomies) several animals, gathered in a circle around a dignified- and clever-looking old fox, with a piercing glint in his eyes, who had one of his front paws lifted in the air as if making an excited but very serious speech.

And now Edmund could clearly hear, as well as see, the Fox — for it was a Talking Fox — as well as the other Animals who were there. The Fox was leading them in reciting, over and over, this slogan:

"There is no such thing as Christmas! Don't be taken in!" in between telling them that, as they all knew very well and their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had known before them, there was also no such thing as ""spring" in their country either.

"We have waited a hundred years" — said the Fox — "for the presents to come, for the ice to melt, for the snow to stop falling for more than a few hours at a time. We know, by the hard and lifelong personal experience of each and every one of us, that we cannot bring Christmas by our own actions. We can neither create not receive the presence of Father Christmas, whom we have all been taught since infancy to await and revere — no, nor his presents either — by the unaided work of our paws. What mere mortal Animalkind can do is, by its intrinsically imperfect and limited nature, never quite enough. True gifts — with real power and true magic within them — gifts that _really_ heal, _really_ protect, _really_ defend and feed and cheer those to whom they are given — are beyond us. If they are offered, do not be taken in by offers you think you cannot refuse — for remember, always, that every so-called 'magic granter of gifts' we have ever seen living memory has proved either a fraud or a villain: either a powerless fake — like a Rabbit wearing the cast-off antlers of some mighty Stag — or, like the Witch, a powerful foe."

Here a middle-aged Beaver chimed in. "It's just like what my father taught me, and his father taught him, and" — here the Beaver paused and swallowed hard — "what the missus and I taught our little ones: or tried to, anyway, before the Witch got to them by dangling some specially tasty vittles just in front of their noses. Don't ever trust anyone who looks like a human but isn't! No two ways about it: no matter what fancy kind of sleigh the creature may be driving, or what the creature is trying to give you. Keep far from _any_ mysterious human-looking creature that isn't human, even if maybe it once was a human or claimed to be: and that goes as much for Father Christmas as for the Witch!"

"Thank you, friend Woodcast," the Fox resumed as the Beaver sat down and the other Animals applauded loudly. "We know, too — " (the Fox continued) "because the very wisest Owls and many other Animals of Science have long ago worked it out — that, if the fabled 'spring' ever did actually come to our country as the old rhymes claim it will, the land would soon perish in floods as the accumulated ice, snow, and hail of a century began to melt and drown us all. It has also been found that, if 'spring' ever came to us, almost every Animal within the reach of that vast change of temperature would immediately begin to lose almost all of its hair or feathers, in a frightening process called ''shedding.'' DO NOT let yourself be taken in by those who believe in 'spring someday' and who want you and your children to believe in it too. Do not believe it even if you think or sense or feel that it is real and that it is finally here: thought and sense and feeling can all be fooled. The foulest things can be made to seem the fairest: the worst of poisons can be made, and are daily made, to seem the best of foods. I would die" (said the Fox) "before I took into paw or muzzle anything offered to me by a human-appearing sleigh-rider. And this is because I _would_ die, one way or another, if I took into head or heart anything offered to me by those who counsel such carelessness. You would not let the Witch feed your body on bad magic food: why let anyone feed your mind on bad magic ideas?"

Then the whole scene became once again small and distant, and then too small and distant to be seen — and the sound of the Animals' voices likewise became small and distant, and then too small and too distant to be heard — as the Lion turned to Edmund and said:

"You see now the consequences of refusing to be taken in. When you refuse, once too often, to be taken in by your tormentor — just as you refused, once, the Witch who called herself Queen — someday you may find that you have refused, once and for all, to be taken out of your torment and thereby to take others out of theirs. As was spoken and written long ago — in a phrase of Deep Magic that somehow strayed long ago into the hearing of Adam's sons — 'It's your own bloody fault if you get it wrong.'"


End file.
